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coweatman · 6 years

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there are good photos in the original, but, y’know, paywall.

Genesis P-Orridge Has Always Been a Provocateur of the Body. Now She’s at Its Mercy.

By John Leland

Neil Andrew Megson discovered Max Ernst when he was 15 years old, and it set a course for his life. The book was called “The Hundred Headless Woman,” surrealistic collages of human and animal forms. It presented the body as fluid and mutable, and the self as open to negotiation. It was the mid-1960s, and to a British schoolboy who felt he didn’t fit in — into his school, his gender, his body — this was freedom.

In the half-century since, Megson — better known as the musician and visual artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge — has steadily probed at the boundaries of the body, both literally and figuratively, evolving from art provocateur to founder of the influential British bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV to semi-established fine artist with archives at the Tate Britain. As P-Orridge now considers retiring from live music, Throbbing Gristle’s albums from the 1970s and early 1980s are newly available in deluxe reissues on Mute.

At 68, P-Orridge lives on the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan in a body racked by chronic myelomonocytic leukemia.

“I’m stable right now, my blood counts are close to normal,” P-Orridge said on a recent afternoon at home, flanked by a snoring Pekingese named Musty Dagger. “But at some point it will finally flare up and become terminal, and there’s no way to know when that might be. Optimistically, two years. Less optimistically, a year, maybe six months. And then I’m on the downward slope to death.”

The artist at home: working-class English accent, Rogaine in the bathroom, black T-shirt reading “Thank God for Abortion.” Breast implants and a mouth full of metal teeth, an idea P-Orridge got from watching the movie “Belle de Jour” on LSD. Shelves full of books and artwork, mostly by P-Orridge, including various fetish objects and a wooden rabbit dotted in blood, the residue of hundreds of ketamine injections.

Since a series of operations with Jacqueline Breyer P-Orridge, P-Orridge’s wife, who died in 2007, P-Orridge prefers genderless pronouns, usually first person plural, but is O.K. with female pronouns. Her life, she said, was an experiment that was still playing out.

“We know that Neil Andrew Megson decided to create an artist, Genesis P-Orridge, and insert it into the culture,” she said. “Some people take their lives and turn them into the equivalent of a work of art. So we invented Genesis, but Gen forgot Neil, really. Does that person still exist somewhere, or did Genesis gobble him up? We don’t know the answer. But thank you, Neil.”

It has been a provocative run. P-Orridge first came into being with a Dadaist performance collective called COUM Transmissions, whose shows included whipping, masturbation and live sex; “Prostitution,” their 1976 retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, included nudity and bloody tampons and scandalized the British public.

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When P-Orridge and others branched off that year to form Throbbing Gristle, they added assaultive industrial noise and Nazi imagery to the mix.

“In terms of being shocking, punk was pretty tame in comparison,” said Simon Reynolds, the author of “Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984.” “They were writing songs about serial killers and cutting themselves onstage.”

In 1981, P-Orridge reversed course in the gently trippy Psychic TV, whose danceable songs echoed the occult writings of Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, and included a tribute to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones called “Godstar.” P-Orridge imagined the band as the center of a global consciousness raising, and recruited fans to join Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, a cross between a fan club and a cult, whose members donned paramilitary gear and submitted bodily fluids as part of their initiation.

In 1995, after a recording session with the band Love and Rockets in the Los Angeles home of the producer Rick Rubin, P-Orridge woke up to a massive electrical fire there and jumped from a second-story window, shattering her arm and suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. Psychic TV went on hiatus, but returned in the late ’90s and again with a new lineup in 2003.

But all the time she was making collages and other visual art, including a solo show at the Rubin Museum of Art that made The New York Times’s roundup of the Best Art of 2016. And she was writing books, including, most recently, “His Name Was Master,” a collection of interviews with Brion Gysin, whose “Cut-Up” literary experiments with William S. Burroughs — splicing and recombining texts to unlock meanings — have been a driving aesthetic in P-Orridge’s work and life.

It takes a moment in the apartment to realize that the two naked blondes in a wall-sized photograph, identical of breast and chin, are P-Orridge and Lady Jaye, Jacqueline’s nickname. In the bedroom are photos of their California wedding, June 1995, Friday the 13th. Genesis was the bride. Lady Jaye wore a mustache, tight leather pants and a leather vest, nothing underneath.

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Their marriage — they met at an S & M dungeon in New York, where Lady Jaye worked — began a new creative phase, this one a partnership, in which their main medium was their bodies.

Lady Jaye was both a registered nurse and a dominatrix, a delightful combination. P-Orridge sometimes worked with her at the dungeon, as the domineering Lady Sarah. The pay wasn’t bad — maybe $200 an hour for what was called a “tribute” — but the work wasn’t steady, she said. They had money from a lawsuit after the fire, and an idea: What if they altered their bodies to become a third entity, neither male nor female, but free from the binary framework that they saw as destructive?

They called their project the pandrogyne, the fusing of two persons into a third that only existed when they were together. P-Orridge had been an early proponent of piercing and ritual cutting or scarring. The pandrogyne was their way of applying Burroughs’s and Gysin’s “Cut-Up” technique to their own flesh.

P-Orridge, the father of two daughters from a previous marriage — she attended PTA meetings in a miniskirt and thigh-high boots — remembered calling up her daughter Genesse, saying, “‘There’s something you ought to know. Lady Jaye and myself, we got matching breast implants last week.’ And Genesse just said, ‘What? You got breast implants when you could have bought me a new car?’ That was 2003. She was about 19.”

“My daughters adore me still, despite everything that’s been unorthodox,” she added. “They don’t bat an eye. They call me Papa Gen-Gen.”

Lady Jaye had surgery on her chin and nose to match her mate’s. The couple took hormones but didn’t like them; they took ketamine, daily, and liked it so much that they often went to sleep with full syringes on their night stands, so that whoever woke up first could inject the other partner in mid-slumber.

The French filmmaker Marie Losier documented their relationship in the 2012 documentary “The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye,” which ran at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this month.

The writer Douglas Rushkoff, who briefly played in Psychic TV, recalled nights in the city with Gen and Jackie, as he called the Breyer P-Orridges (like other old friends, Rushkoff refers to P-Orridge by masculine pronouns).

“He and Jackie were our most normal friends,” he said. “We’d just go to the Indian restaurant. He had weird teeth or took weird drugs or had weird art, but we would talk about what to do with savings, or how to deal with air conditioning. Just normal, mundane stuff.”

Then in 2007, Lady Jaye died of an acute heart arrhythmia. Her death left P-Orridge alone, one half of an art project that no longer had a second half.

“It became really tricky,” Rushkoff said. “To make that level of commitment, not just in marriage and love, but to do this thing to your body that doesn’t quite make sense anymore without the other half, that’s rough.”

When P-Orridge developed leukemia, Rushkoff organized a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign that has raised almost $55,000 for her medical bills.

“We realized for the first time in a tangible way how much people care for me,” P-Orridge said. “That was really beautiful to discover. See, I’m getting teary already. That’s a good feeling, that that many people want you to stay.”

The prankishness of P-Orridge’s work sometimes distracts people from the art itself, said Jarrett Earnest, 31, an art critic and curator who met her at a performance piece by Leigha Mason called “Spit Banquet,” in which people sat at a table and spat into empty vessels.

“What she’s done as a thinker and as a maker, this has not been understood in the wider art world,” Earnest said. “People in the music world know her in a specific way. But her writing and her ideas about culture and the relationship of life to art are so profound.”

Earnest added: “She does a lot to play the part of the cartoon, because there’s a part of her that’s really silly. She is those things, but at the same time this sweet, profound, authentic person. It’s not just someone with weird teeth who looks like a cult leader.”

On another afternoon in October, P-Orridge wore a T-shirt that read “Cult Leader.” She was recovering from pneumonia, preparing to travel to Europe for two concerts, the last two dates in an otherwise scrapped tour. After that, she said, she did not expect to tour again, because her health was too unpredictable.

And she was in love, with a woman she’d met in Granada a few years back.

“We certainly didn’t expect it, at our age,” she said. “What a beautiful surprise it was to be in love again. She’s 28. It’s ridiculous, but what can you do, man?”

In the last year, an old bandmate and girlfriend, known as Cosey Fanni Tutti, accused P-Orridge in a memoir of being physically and emotionally abusive. P-Orridge said she had not seen the book, but denied the allegations. “Whatever sells a book sells a book,” she said.

And she was busy, preparing two volumes of her notebooks from the 1960s and a graphic novel called “Man Into Wolf,” whose title comes from a 1948 book about sadism, masochism and werewolves. Museums, she said, were calling about new and old work.

“Derek Jarman said, ‘Gen, when they know you’ve got a terminal illness, they start liking what you do,’” she said, referring to the director and author. “‘You wait and see.’ And now people want the art in art exhibitions.”

If there is a next chapter, P-Orridge hopes it will be to form a collective community, with people sharing resources but having more privacy than in a commune. The ‘60s dream still drives her.

“When you’ve got a terminal illness, you think about what your legacy might be,” she said. “My only answer is, we would hope that it would inspire people to see that they can do a life totally as they would like it to unfold. Live your life every day like a page in your book of life, and make that page as interesting as you can. Whenever you have a choice, say: Which is the better page in my book?”

She said she was not afraid of death. “I’d like to stay, because it’s fascinating here,” she said. “But as far as we can tell, having a physical body is a luxury we don’t often get, and too many people squander that luxury.”

She smiled, a mouthful of gleaming metal. “We’ve not squandered it,” she said. “We’ve utilized it to the maximum we could.”

A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 11, 2018, on Page AR19 of the New York edition with the headline: Provocateur of the Body, Now at Its Mercy.

#psychic tv #throbbing gristle #genesis p-orridge

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girlvsgun-blog · 7 years

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Interview with Sam Nigrosh of Trash City Comix

Girl vs. Gun got a chance to chat with illustrator Sam Nigrosh about the latest issue of Trash City Comix. We wanted to know a little more about the world of DIY comic books as well as any connection to current politics and music. Nigrosh also plays in Cemetery, one of Chicago’s most promising dark punk bands of recent years. He was kind enough to share a preview with us of the upcoming project which features contributions from many different artists taking on the topic of “cyber issues”.

You have been involved in illustrating for a long time, talk about how you got really interested in DIY comics and zines?

I first started doing DIY comics in Chicago while I was at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. My friends and I started a zine called Windy City Dumps which we pooled all our beer money to make and then distributed freely amongst friends and to baffled strangers around the city. Our main motivation was, “Everything they’re telling us in our drawing and painting classes seems like a crock of shit, so why don’t we just make the stuff we want to see instead.” Results thus far have been inconclusive!

You are on your second Trash City Comix, tell us about the inspiration for the upcoming edition?

For this edition I wanted to see if it would be easier to organize people under a theme. The sub title for this issue is “Cyber Issues” so whatever that meant to people I accepted. Turns out it basically meant people banging aliens and robots! Some people were turned off by this theme and some were on board. I think in the future I’m going to create a list of themes for the year and have people sign on for the one they want to do. To me Trash City is all about community and establishing new connections between art and artists. Hopefully it takes some people out of their comfort zone and allows for people working in different styles and mediums to commune and respond to each other’s work.

What are you particularly excited about? Who will be featured?

I’m very excited about having more concentrated comic work by people. I love having one offs and illustrations but it’s great when I can get some sustained narratives too. I want the reader to feel like they’re getting some good stuff for their money. In terms of artists involved I’m very happy to have so many new people entering the fold. A lot of the people I approached were really excited to try out comics or hadn’t done one in a long time. I can’t pick a favorite but I think Chloe Perkis is really killing it right now. Other contributors are: Arturo Fresan, Ryan Doherty, Leigha Mason, Zach Dillon, Ben Marcus, Lane Milburn, Megan Diddie, Shea Hardacre, Tobias Sinclair & myself. Definitely a major team of total RULERS.

Tell us about the upcoming release party, where and when?

The upcoming release party is going to be taking place at my home away from home ‘Knee Deep Vintage’ (1425 W 18th St in Pilsen) on March 10th from 6pm til Midnight. It’s part of Pilsen 2nd Fridays and there will be tons of shops having sales all up and down 18th St. Come out, grab some dinner, hit the shops, grab a drink and support the community here.

Tell us about a little bit about yourself and what you are up to besides comics?

Outside of comics I mainly do illustration work for people like AdHOC, Thrill Jockey, Dark Matter Coffee & Hausu Mountain. You can see examples of that at http://www.suneaterstudio.com Get in touch if you are a band, musician or promoter, I like to work within the community. At least once a year I try and tour with my death rock band Cemetery and see all of our friends across the country. We should be doing a new album this year but I decline to be held to that. Finally everyone should definitely remember that you need muscles to smash the state so start doing your pushups every morning!

You can find the event page for the release party here. If you are interested in ordering your copy you can do so here.

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riotofperfume · 10 years

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INTERVIEW Jarrett Earnest, Leigha Mason, Alex Sloane, and Whitney Vangrin of 1:1

1:1 is a new project space in New York’s Lower East Side founded by artists Jarrett Earnest, Leigha Mason, Alex Sloane, and Whitney Vangrin. Since celebrating its opening on March 10, the space already boasts an impressive and diverse schedule of exhibitions, performances, and collaborative events.Riot of Perfume visited 121 Essex Street 2nd floor to discuss 1:1’s development.

Desi Gonzalez: I love the part of your mission statement in which you describe your space as “welcom[ing] contradiction.” I think this is a great place to start. Can you tell me more about how 1:1 welcomes contradiction?

Leigha Mason: The foundation of 1:1 is the social possibilities of a physical space, which I think is inevitably full of contradictions. We aren’t trying to deconstruct something in order to install a solution, but more to excite a series of activity. It isn’t a pessimistic project, but I don’t believe in utopia either. We aren’t interested in policing ourselves.

Jarrett Earnest: “We welcome contradiction” refers to how we’re treating the space in the way we frame it, both in language and the way we organize events. We’re advocating for certain artists or practices, and we stand behind what we believe in, but that should never be hammered down. To be against contradiction in that sense, or even simply “changing your mind” would be castrating and very conservative.

Alex Sloane: We really are a whole mix of contradictions. None of us have the same idea of what this place is, and that’s kind of what makes it work.

Gonzalez: How did 1:1 come together? When did you four first conceive of the space, and when did it finally open?

Sloane: Our grand opening was on the eve of March 10. We moved in on March 1 and only had a 9 day turn-around for the actual space in terms of cleaning it up, painting, installing the show, etc. But the idea to open a space as an art project had been brewing in each of us for months. We had all sorts of ideas, this desire for something different.

Whitney Vangrin: It wasn’t just a desire – it was a necessity.

Mason: Yes, I found it impossible to exist in the presented, systematic way of living. It was totally necessary for me to carve out my own space, or else I was going to die.

Earnest: Putting up shows is always, inherently, making an argument, even if it is indirect. The things that you show, the way that you show them, the whole framework is an argument. I was seeing a lot of arts institutions being hesitant to make judgment calls or advocating strongly for positions. Yesterday, Whitney and I saw The Ungovernables at the New Museum, which is almost like a sociological or half-anthropological view.

Sloane: It’s so removed.

Mason: A survey of neutrality.

Earnest: We’re interested in sincere and playful ideas.

Gonzalez: How did the name 1:1 come about?

Earnest: Our location is 121 Essex Street—one two one. But then we arrived at this image of the proportion 1:1; it encapsulated a lot of things we wanted to do with the space.

Sloane: We had different conceptions of what the ratio represents; Genesis & Chaos, one to one intimate personal interactions, a pouring ratio to mix silicones, it’s infinite!

Gonzalez: How do you all know each other, and how did you come together in establishing this space?

Mason: Whitney, Jarrett and I met when we were 16 and living in Oakland. We all moved to New York at separate times and intersected.

Vangrin: I moved to New York first. I hadn’t seen Jarrett in years, and when he came, we went to see the W.A.C.K. show at PS1. We were both absolutely in love with a lot of feminist artists, and we had such an intense connection over the work. Then Jarrett went back to the West Coast and I didn’t see him, but the following year, Leigha showed up in New York.

Mason: We ran into each other in an elevator.

Gonzalez: That’s amazing.

Vangrin: And then we met Alex, who was coming from across the ocean, and eventually we went back over the ocean—

Sloane: Leigha and Whitney saw a performance that I was workshopping at the time, and they were all brutally honest. Leigha actually attacked me with confetti in the middle of the performance. I was so upset, I broke picture frames and started yelling and bawling. We somehow became friends! Leigha and Whitney were in a show at ICA London last summer, and came to stay with me in Gloucestershire. It was a part of my life in New York coming to see my life in rural England.

Mason: We’ve been together through a lot of intense and stressful situations.

Gonzalez: What are your backgrounds as artists? Whitney, you’re starting a performance here next month, right?

Vangrin: I work as a performance artist but also as a sculptor. The sculpture is always intertwined; it’s something I don’t think will escape my performative work for a long time. I’m interested in the relationships between the performer, the “prop”, and the audience. My last long-term performance was based around Joan Of Arc and Maria Falconetti. I’m attracted to what film actresses experience: the idea that you’re performing but you feel “authentic” and painful emotions at the same time. I also come from a catholic family. In The Joan Cycle, I knelt on a slate slab for nearly 2 hours (among other self-inflicted regimentation). It was a painful thing, but I think there is something in the consciousness of presenting a live female body in pain to an audience and considering what the reaction and responsibility of the audience might be. It’s about what happens to your body when you’re watching another body. I’m now working on a performative triptych that is a sort of continuation of my Joan of Arc work. The first section will be a SWEAT PIECE that I present in April here at 1:1.

Sloane: My performances are also concerned with the complexities between the experience and depiction of the female body. My performances and photographs come out of a very traditional approach to artmaking, I used to do an awful lot of still life paintings. I happen to really love still life paintings, I still do. I think that the still life still holds significance for contemporary art. We all do, 1:1 is actually constructing a massive still life in the Banquet for Artaud here on April 7. Anyways, I moved from painting to making tableaux utilizing my body; there’s generally no movement happening within them. It’s a visual still life with living elements. I’m also very concerned with the distinction between performance for the camera and performance before a live audience, and how this generates different reception.

Mason: I started out doing a lot of image-driven paintings, things about disease, and their political context. Then I got really disillusioned by the idea of making what I felt were passive objects, so I started doing really aggressive performances where I was disrupting lectures, things like that. I was against these factories of role-making. After being involved with some of the Occupation, I realized that actually representation plays a crucial role in protest, and in ‘action’ in general. I’ve been trying to come to terms with recent political implications of modes of representation by making film, since they are, in a way, images and objects but they’re also not.

Gonzalez: Right, they’re not so static.

Mason: Yeah. The work that I have up now at 1:1 is a film I’ve been working on for a while based on a Brecht narrative of BAAL, which is a name that is separately used to communicate both demon and deity. There are some personal experiences that play into the film as well. Even though I’m working on a lot of other things, 1:1 is the most important and lively “work” for me right now.

Gonzalez: I’ve noticed that—how in this space you don’t just produce discrete projects. There is a thread of thought running through all exhibitions, performances, and events. Especially in the way that you incorporate your own work into the space.

Mason: We’re really event-driven. It’s important that we have active bodies that have to navigate the space, and have to navigate each other and various other practices.

Earnest: Obviously the body and performativity are something we’re all very involved in. That’s what connects our work. The public-facing work I do is primarily writing, both in an academic context as a doctoral student in art history, and in criticism for the Brooklyn Rail and other magazines, but I also make performances and draw. I do performances that are based on taking other forms, especially artist talks or lectures, and trying to explode those. The last big one I did was about Dolly Parton and performativity and psychoanalysis.

You mentioned that we incorporate our own work into the space. We’re showing a lot of people who might be our friends, but are also the smartest or most interesting people we know. And necessarily, there would be no reason to do the space if I didn’t feel so strongly about the work of these three women I work with. It would be a crime not to include their work.

Part of what we like doing is taking hero figures, like Genesis P-Orridge, or who are now dead, like Pasolini or Brecht, and recontextualizing their practice in the contemporary moment, while at the same time contextualizing our work and the work of our peers. We hope to articulate alternative lineages in relationship to others.

Gonzalez: Okay, so this neighborhood: you’re in the Lower East Side. Why did you choose this location for the space, considering three of you live in Brooklyn?

Mason: There are a lot of spaces in this proximity that we respect and want to be in dialogue with.

Gonzalez: Which spaces?

Mason: Participant Inc., Reena Spaulings, CAGE. These are people that have been really helpful, that we want to do things with, and be in dialogue with.

Vangrin: We are also aware of a constant relationship to history, and how things that have happened can leave spaces or neighborhoods psychically charged. There’s an embedded history on the Lower East Side.

Mason: 1:1 is haunted.

Gonzalez: Do you have any other relationships with institutions or individuals that have been instrumental in founding 1:1?

Sloane: We were really lucky to get access to Materials for the Arts, which we gained through our association with Franklin Furnace and [its founder] Martha Wilson, who we knew—she’s utterly fantastic.

Gonzalez: Do you work with her?

Mason: Well, Franklin Furnace accepts tax-deductible donations on our behalf. Martha had been really helpful in terms of giving us advice.

Gonzalez: How do you know her?

Mason: Whitney, Alex, and I used to workshop performances with her. She’s been something of a mentor for all three of us.

Vangrin: The power of this woman who’s always supported artists in so many regards and [her power] to continue to be so supportive of our project, is something that I am in awe of and extremely grateful for.

Interview by Desi Gonzalez Photographed by Gregory Aune

#1:1 GALLERY #jarrett earnest #WHITNEY VANGRIN #leigha mason #desi gonzalez

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